Even if you use Spring and Hibernate there are many things that I would hope you find useful: * The discussion of the various design options for business logic organization and encapsulate, database access and concurrency: their benefits, drawbacks and when to use them. * Developing a rich domain model using test-driven development techniques. * Designing Spring-based DAOs for testability * Testing strategies for an ORM-based persistent layer including how to speed up tests by testing as much as you can without a database * Comparison of EJB 3 with Spring/Hibernate/JDO * Using iBATIS for database access * The discussion of database concurrency options including optimistic offline locking and pessimistic offline locking.